Mobile Social Interbike 2009 Recap

Now that we’ve all gotten back into the groove from Interbike we wanted to reach out and give a thanks for the great Mobile Social event, and provide a bit of our thoughts about thank REI, Globe, and Dahon).

It’s hard to believe that this was just the third year that Bike Hugger was at Interbike, the response we got to the Mobile Social was fantastic. Within days of announcing the logistics for the event we had 100 people pre-registered for the event. We gave out all 250 wristbands we brought, and had more people come through our tent to watch the crit and hang out, including Gary Fisher, who had a few beers and chatted with our attendees.

If you haven’t seen my shots from the MoSo, click through the photo to my stream, or visit the Bike Hugger Flickr group.

As a long-time ride leader for my club, seeing 100 people show up on a ride is pretty amazing, but seeing 100 people riding the Strip without incident was just great.

Buzz was pretty high as well, with us blogging the heck out of the MoSo and with people coming out to the start and saying hello. We clearly got the word out about this, and future events will be longer and more focused on riding.

In terms of giveaways and raffles, we probably should measure the prize giveaway in pounds and in enthusiasm. The support from companies in terms of schwag was fantastic, and the attendees were quite stoked. We easily had a good 100 pounds of stuff to give away, not including the bike from Novara.

The winner of the Novara bike practically knocked me over thanking me for the prize. I’m still telling people about how excited he was. Here he is on the ride.

At the same time, we’ve noticed that the industry’s focus on Interbike has changed a bit as has focus on trade shows in other industries. This isn’t surprising as the Internet has really removed a lot of the need for people to walk around booths. Still, there are a lot of products that will still only be announced at shows–that’s just the way things still work–so we’ll likely work on shifting our focus to Eurobike as the economy recovers and taking a closer look at the On Dirt Demo, which we think has more resonance with readers. (We find that people generally would prefer to get a really serious look at a few of the in-demand bikes than a cursory look at dozens of them.)